James Hynes

My lizard brain this morning is still pretty hysterical, but it's a happy kind of hysterical. I was up until 1:30 am last night, but set my alarm for 6 this morning so I could go out and get a New York Times before they were all gone. In the end, I woke up at 5, listened to the radio for a bit while I lounged in bed, then went out at 5:30 in search of a Times. I bought the only two copies they had at my local Walgreens—one for me and one for my wife, who asked me to get her one, too—then I went over to Randall's, my local 24-hour supermarket, and bought one there, too, to wrap in plastic and keep in the closet with my copy of the Times from September 12, 2001.

It's windy and overcast in Austin this morning, which is actually a lot like the weather in Michigan 28 years ago, the day after Ronald Reagan was elected. I still remember very distinctly my feeling of disbelief that day as I walked the streets of Ann Arbor in the chill, November gloom, just thinking over and over again, "Ronald Reagan just got elected president. How did that happen?" I really felt that I was sleeping through some kind of weird, slow-motion nightmare, and that any moment I'd wake up and it would turn out that Carter was still president and Reagan was still just a B-list actor. Today, under a similarly gloomy sky, I feel the mirror image of that disbelief—something giddier and happier, but no less surreal. My brother Mike in LA just sent me an e-mail that said "Pinch me," and that sort of sums up how I feel, too. This is too good to be true, right? Please let me know I'm not actually dreaming.

I took the day off work so I could enjoy this. But right now, I'm going back to bed.

Of all the weekly postmortems of episodes of season five of The Wire (in Slate, Salon, Variety, and a zillion other places), one of the most unusual and insightful, not to mention the liveliest and most entertaining by far, is the one in the New York Times Freakonomics blog, "What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire?" It's a weekly discussion of each week's episode by a group of real gangstas (mostly retired) from the New York area, moderated (if that's the word) by Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day. The gentlemen of this informal seminar, which is fueled by beer and pork rinds with hot sauce (which sounds pretty great, actually), go by Wire-worthy sobriquets like Shine and Flavor and Tony-T, and they've already made a number of wonderfully astute predictions, which I won't spoil for you by telling you what they are. It's also a lot of fun to watch the Grey Lady Herself trying without much success to disguise the casual obscenities lacing their conversation. Apparently even the Times' web editors take that "fit to print" business seriously, so you get locutions like "m—er f—ing," which is kind of like the itsy bitsy, teeny weeny string bikini of a bleep that Comedy Central lays over the obscenities on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. You wonder why they even motherfucking bother.

I can't vouch for Professor Venkatesh's book, not having read it, but judging from the title and his sly, self-deprecating prose in the blog, I just might check it out.